In truth, I don’t know if this question belongs in Other Graphics Applications, but then maybe someone could suggest an application that could suit my needs.

I fancy myself a budding SF writer, and as part of my background research I’m working on a map of space near the Sun, plotting the locations of local star clusters, stellar associations, bright nebulae, dark clouds, that sort of thing.

And I should say right away that, yes, I know about http://galaxymap.org/ and other such things; I’ve also looked over a number of books. I’m using them, but there’s recent scientific findings I want to incorporate as well.

One paper I found is this: Cosmography of OB Stars in the Solar Neighborhood by Hervé Bouy & João Alves. (http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2015A%26A...584A..26B) Bouy and Alves created a WebGL-based interactive 3-D map showing the overall density of hot, young stars from their data that they incorporated into their paper and the companion web site at http://sci.esa.int/hipparcos/ob-stars-interactive/. And this is the thing I’m asking about.

Right now, I’m building my map in Partiview (http://virdir.ncsa.illinois.edu/partiview/) because it’s a) free and b) designed to make it easy to plot data in 3-D. More to the point here, it can import abstract 3D shapes as .OBJ files, which is what I want.

If you would look up the map page, there are buttons you can click to turn on/off various data points and features on the map, including the map grid. If you were to turn everything off you’d see a series of nested, blobby shapes floating in space.

This is what I want.

I want to capture those shapes in .OBJ files, but I don’t know how to do that. I’ve found scads of information on how to put OBJ shapes into WebGL, but none on the reverse process. I’ve even emailed the paper’s authors asking if they could provide me their data as OBJ files—or data I could use to make OBJ files—but they haven’t written back.

I’ve examined the web page source and managed to determine what I want are triangle objects 108, 109, and 110—representing the outermost, middle, and innermost layers of the object in question. The data for these objects are in lines 1775-93024. These are the largest, most complex shapes described on the page, the vertex data making up most of the code.

Would anyone know how I could translate that information into an OBJ file? I do have Blender, though I’m not experienced with it. Are there any free and/or open-source applications that can make OBJ files from this data?

About legality, keep in mind this is a scientific paper the authors made freely accessible to the world. Scientists incorporate each other's work all the time, it’s OK so long as they give proper sources and credit. I will do the same. I do not intend to profit directly from their work in any case; my star map is for my own research. Any finished product would, of course, credit Bouy and Alves.

Thanks for any help you can give,